1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an element organization support apparatus, an element organization support method and a storage medium for supporting the formation of a team to organize human or physical elements or a combination of both to accomplish a specific project, and more particularly to improving the efficiency of addition or coordination of elements or of restructuring of the organization.
2. Description of the Related Art
Along with the expanding use of the Internet in recent years, the environment of accomplishing a project is changing significantly, including the emergence of so-called SOHO (small office home office) workers each of whom connects his or her company and home via a network. In corporate business activities as well, so-called outsourcing is drawing attention which addresses short-term peaks in workload or to secure personnel with unique skills by relying on the supply of human resources from a temporary help business or entrusting a whole series of tasks to another company.
On the other hand, there are apparatuses for supporting the generation of a workflow by organizing human and physical resources and their combinations (hereinafter to be collectively referred as “activities”) on the basis of input/output relationships, i.e. what is done by each activity (process) according to the result of what activity (input from the preceding activity) and to what other activity it hands over its result (output to the succeeding activity).
A specific example of such an apparatus, as illustrated in FIG. 22, is provided with a database 1, an input unit 2, a searching unit 3, a display unit 4 and a control unit 5. The database 1 stores the identifier (name of the like) of each activity, input, process and output, correlated to one another, as a set of rules. This set of rules, as illustrated in FIG. 23, is stored with information representing the process, information on the preceding activity (preceding) and information on the succeeding activity (succeeding) correlated to one another with respect to each identifier.
The input unit 2 is an input device, such as a keyboard or a mouse, which conveys what the user's manipulation is intended for to the control unit 5. The searching unit 3, at an instruction from the control unit 5, searches the database 1 for activities with the respective preceding activities and following activities as keys, and supplies the result of the search to the control unit 5. Also, this searching unit 3 receives an input of a starting condition from the control unit 5, and searches for process information with the starting condition as the key, and supplies the result of the search to the control unit 5. The display unit 4 is an output device such as a display or a printer, which displays or prints at an instruction from the control unit 5. The control unit 5 performs processing to add activities to or delete some of the activities stored in the database 1 and processing to select activities to take charge of a series of tasks, out of the activities stored in the database 1, and to output them.
More specifically, the processing by this control unit 5 to add activities includes, in response to the entry from the input unit 2 the identifier (A) and the process (B) of each activity, the preceding activity (C) and the following activity (D) as shown in FIG. 24, sets and stores the activity into the database 1, addition of each activity to be added to the preceding activity (C) as the latter's following activity, and the addition of that activity to be added to the following activity (D) as its preceding activity. The processing to delete activities is to delete each activity whose identifier has been entered from the input unit 2 and to modify the activity preceding and the activity following that activity to be deleted.
Further the processing by this control unit 5 to select and output activities includes, in response to the entry from the input unit 2 the starting condition and the ending condition, causing the searching unit 3 to search for a first activity meeting the starting condition and causing further the searching unit 3 to search for a second activity which has the retrieved first activity as its preceding activity. In this manner, the control unit 5 causes the searching unit 3 to search for plural activities successively, and completes the processing when the ending condition is met. More specifically, for a project of “producing a book”, if “planning” is the starting condition and “printing” is the ending condition, the control unit 5 causes the searching unit 3 to search for an activity having this “planning” as the process. Then the control unit 5, having received the input of the result of search, causes the searching unit 3 to search for an activity following the retrieved activity (“cover design” and “contents preparation in the example of FIG. 23), and repeats this procedure until an activity whose process is “printing” is hit.
A workflow support system for achieving flexible workflow managing by applying, in generating a workflow, workflow rules under decentralized management for workflows difficult to generate while performing back tracking is disclosed in Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. Hei 8-101817 entitled “Workflow Support System”.
An apparatus which, when the starting and ending positions of a partial flow prescribing the sequence of execution are designated, additionally stores new tasks generated by modifying the task preceding the starting position and the task following the ending position of that partial flow into an execution conditions storage section is disclosed in the Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. Hei 9-62733 entitled “Flow Adding Apparatus”.
However, this conventional apparatus for supporting workflow generation, when a new activity is to be registered, finds it difficult to keep that activity consistent in context. That is to say, this conventional workflow generation support apparatus, in which activities are managed on the basis of a so-called input process output (IPO) model, addition, deletion or modification of any activity should be accomplished while maintaining consistency with other activities, decentralized management of activity databases would require reflection of alterations in any database in all other databases, which means serious difficulty in management. There is a further problem that the load of processing to maintain consistency with activities becomes heavier with an increase the number of activities managed by the databases.
Furthermore, the conventional workflow generation support apparatus based on the IPO model, in which links among activities are derived from a preset context, involves another problem that the generation of a work process for selecting a series of activities for accomplishing tasks and carrying out a project lacks flexibility. The presetting of the context causes still another problem that the detection of a new value chain, such as detecting a new linkage, is made difficult.